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Exploring the Value of Connected Supply Chain Systems to Increase ROI
Common Challenges in Managing Disparate Systems During Peak Season
For example, according to Emma Cosgrove of Supply Chain Dive, “warehouse management software intended to register what was in the warehouse and update availability on its website.” As a result, the company lost insight into its actual inventory and found itself unable to meet peak season demand.
- Increased volume and speed of order fulfillment and transportation. Disparate systems are also limited in their ability to scale when peak season and e-commerce logistics orders swell.
- Inability to see end-to-end movements and intervene when problems arise. When a supply chain exception does occur, the ability to recognize the problem and intervene promptly is crucial. Failure to do so could result in a poor customer experience, missed deliveries, and higher supply chain costs.
- Limited access to supplier processes and poor collaboration. The lack of insight into supplier and supply chain partner processes may also lead to anomalies within the supply chain. For instance, a simple error during a system upgrade delayed 5% of shipments for customers in a supplier network, said Cosgrove. If the company had been able to see that the issue was, in fact, an upgrade on the supplier network, it could have rerouted inventory to account for that change.
Unified Supply Chain Systems Promote Scalability and Higher Customer Service
A unified, connected supply chain enables scalability and improved customer service levels. Since company partners can see freight activities in real-time, the risk of a delay or exception decreases. Furthermore, robotics processes, including physical robots and robotics process automation (RPA), can virtually free resources to help companies do more with less. In a sense, these automated functions create an unmatched level of scalability. They may further handle all customer service inquiries without giving rise to the sense of lost human-to-human interactions in customer service. It’s that simple.
Additional Steps to Leveraging a Connected Supply Chain Systems in E-Commerce
Automation in logistics and connected supply chain systems optimize the whole process to meet customer demands. Remember that the supply chain is reliant on internal and external factors for success. As explained by PwC, the modern supply chain must overcome the traditional linear nature of logistics:
“A traditional linear supply chain creates blind spots, gaps of knowledge, and lack of real-time information. Bring down those walls and create a dynamic, adaptive, and connected supply chain ecosystem with built-in intelligence and automation—transforming reactive response into confident leadership.”
To achieve these goals, supply chain leaders should follow these steps:
- Rethink your distribution system.
- Identify barriers to customer service improvements and common causes of freight exceptions.
- Apply artificial intelligence and automation in logistics to capture and analyze more data.
- Retrofit the supply chain with connected sensors that continuously provide end-to-end visibility.
- Encourage supply chain partners to use similar systems, if not the same in TMS as your company, to reduce inconsistencies.
- Share data within and outside the four walls of your company to speed operations.
- Use software-as-a-service (SaaS) platforms to create scalable architecture that adds value without increasing costs too extravagantly.
